Paying Karma in Advance, Brother Anandamoy’s Spaghetti Story

Master said that if you are in tune with me then I can take care of your karma. If not, then you tune me out.

Story: They had almost finished the building in Hollywood. For the new café Master had created some recipes. One was for a new spaghetti sauce. Master asked Brother Bimalananda (?) if it was as good as what his mother fixed. Master invited them up for spaghetti with the new sauce. Brother Anandamoy had just had supper and was very full and now he had to eat a plate of spaghetti. He didn’t tell Master that he was full because Master always knew what Brother was thinking. [He knows you, too! Not like a policeman but like a loving mother making sure that her children are behaving and moving quickly to the divine goal.]

Remember:1. Master never did anything without a purpose.2. He is not mean.

So, the spaghetti came and it was a big plate. Brother was having a hard time eating every bit of it. (This was in 1951.) As Brother went to his room he said to himself, forget it. I’ll never know why Master did it, it’s training. In 1952, was Master’s mahasamadhi.

In 1953, Brother was transferred to Hollywood to work in the kitchen. He just hoped that they wouldn’t ask him to cook. He was worried because as a devotee you cannot hate anything. Brother Lawrence also had a great aversion to cooking so Brother Anandamoy thought that it’s okay, a saint hated cooking, too. Then, he was asked to learn to make some of the dishes. The first recipe was Master’s spaghetti sauce. Unfortunately, Brother did it very well so he was given other recipes to learn to cook. Meera Ma then put him in charge of the kitchen. Brother came into the ashram to find God and now I’m a cook. It is a part of seeking God to overcome the ego, to overcome likes and dislikes.

Have you ever had a dark day? Well, this was a triple dark day. It was the noon rush and the spaghetti sauce was not good. Brother told the nun helping him to serve it anyway. She said, I can’t do that; people will get sick. He said to go ahead, I’ll take the karma. She obeyed. Then Brother thought, my God what have I done?! But it was too late to recall the order so he begged Master, please, you know that I’m an idiot. Please do something. Then he went back to his cooking.

After the lunch rush he was cleaning up. The nun said, you should have heard what Mrinalini Mata said about your spaghetti. (Once in awhile, Mrinalini Mata came to Hollywood to visit her mother, Meera Mata.) She raved over the spaghetti saying, you never had spaghetti so perfect as today. So, Master was taking care of things.

Brother had a flashback regarding why Master had him eat that big plate of spaghetti years earlier. It’s hard to explain and to understand this. We, in our human consciousness, are subject to time and space, the properties of maya and delusion. In the Bhagavad Gita, p. 701, Master says that human consciousness is limited by time (the past, present, and future) but God’s consciousness is ever aware throughout eternity. There is no past, no future. Eternal consciousness has one time – the ever present. It’s hard for us to understand this. Only liberated yogis know the past, present, and future happenings, which are always going on in the ever present Now.

Master’s consciousness was in God’s consciousness of the eternal now. He knew of Brother Anandamoy’s future mistake and because of that he made Brother work out that karma before Brother did what he did later and at the same time he changed the spaghetti sauce so that Mrinalina Mata and others would not get sick.